Group Decision-Making: Characteristics of Groups

We will begin our discussions of group decision-making by looking at various characteristics of groups that affect the decision-making process. This will include their compositions, purposes, interpersonal relationships, personalities, and other factors that affect their capacities for making decisions. These are all a part of what is called “group dynamics,” the way groups actually function.

In the first article of this series, I defined individual decisions as those made by an individual acting alone and included de facto individual situations such as when a single person makes a decision for a group essentially on his own, irrespective of other people’s ideas or suggestions. This can occur in a variety of settings and is not uncommon in business and other settings such as families and politics. Here, we see the ideas of the strongest person in the room becoming the “decision” of the group.

A true group decision-making process, then, will actually be one in which two or more individuals are actively involved and whose goal is to reach common agreement on a course of action. How they get there is going to be the subject of future articles in this series, but first let’s talk about how groups are formed and how they work.

There are many settings in which groups will be making decisions. In businesses, many of these decision-making groups are committees. There are both standing committees and ad hoc committees, those formed for a specific task and, when that task is finished, disbanded. There are other groups called by different names, such as Boards of Directors, Boards of Governors, Boards of Trustees, Working Groups, Task Forces and the like in many businesses and organizations, but here I will refer to any group that makes decisions, for convenience, as a committee. In what, traditionally, are considered non-business settings – clubs, homeowner’s associations, schools, governments, religious organizations, even families – there is usually a group making important decisions as well. Other than family settings, where there is often a very special set of dynamics in play, everything I talk about for the next set of articles can be applied to all of these. Family decision-making may be the topic of a later series.

What is a committee? Generally, it is a group of individuals with a specific task or set of tasks that they are to deal with and make decisions about. Sometimes the task(s) includes seeing that the decisions are implemented and sometimes their task is to make recommendations to some senior management group for a course of action. But they have an assigned and (we hope) defined task they are expected to carry out. That almost inevitably includes making decisions.

The membership of these committees is somewhat dependent on their purpose. For a small business of a few employees, there may be only a small management group composed of the owner and a couple of senior employees that makes the decisions. For larger organizations, such as the multinational pharmaceutical company I worked in for twenty years, there may be multiple committees at many levels: Board, senior management, division, department, and even, in large departments, smaller subdivisions, say, along product lines. At any rate, in companies large and small there is always something that functions as a committee or perhaps a lot of them.

All such groups are composed of individuals who have to work together. Each has their own personality and style of decision-making. Personality and decision-making style interact, both in the individual and across individuals in a group, affecting the participation of the individuals in the group and ultimately the success of the group.

I talked about approaches to, or styles of, decision-making by individuals in the second and third articles in this series. I did not go into personality types, mainly because that is a huge field with volumes written. Many of us have taken “personality inventory” evaluations, like Meyers-Briggs or the MMPI, in the past, and in discussing the evaluation have learned about how the different types of profiles not only function, including, at least generally, how they make decisions, but also how they interact.

Here is my general summary of various personality types. The terms I use do not necessarily match those in the personality inventories but represent my ideas. You will note that I have roughly paired opposite types but in reality there is a continuum, a spectrum, of personalities, and the behavioral traits that are ascribed to them; it is also common for people to express different traits, sometimes polar opposites, in different situations. With those thoughts in mind, here goes:

• Dominant – Submissive
• Assertive – Passive
• Pleasant – Abrasive
• Outgoing – Withdrawn
• Risk Takers – Risk Averse
• Loud – Quiet
• Take Charge – Follower
• Impetuous – Thoughtful
• Planner – Charge Ahead

This in no way is an exhaustive list but some common personality types I have seen in many settings. If you have your own personal favorites to add to the list, please do it and, if you please, send them on.

I have deliberately chosen not to use negatively-loaded terms, like aggressive, because they actually represent not a specific behavior but a spectrum of behaviors. The negative connotations associated with terms like aggressive often obscure the full range and impact the interactions with others. In fact, each of these represent a spectrum of behaviors and people will exhibit variations and even different, sometimes polar opposite, behaviors in different situations and times. We are complex creatures and consistency is not a requirement!

Next week, we will discuss a few of these pairs of behaviors. Some are pretty obvious but others may not be. Assertive – Passive will be a good place to start.